CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
For a Magazine package of stories on animal rights activists, we would like a portrait of Lisa Franzetta, one of the leading activists for Peta, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Over the past four years, this Oakland resident has traveled the world running campaigns and doing street theater. She has been dressed as everything from a tiger to someone wearing nothing but a lettuce bikini.

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
For a Magazine package of...

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PETA, people for the Ethical Treatment of Animals staged a mad cow-related demonstration in front of Tad's Steakhouse on Powell Street in SF. They were handing out vegetarian literature to the shoppers.
Michael Maloney / The Chronicle

ONE TIME USE ONLY 225478 02: Co-Authors Susan McCarthy and Jeffrey Masson sit together at a book signing for "When Elephants Weep" May 22, 1995 in New York City. The book provides anecdotal and factual evidence of a wide range of animal emotions including fear, hope, hate, love, friendship, grief, joy, compassion, sadness, rage, and altruism. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Liaison)

Photo: Evan Agostini

ONE TIME USE ONLY 225478 02: Co-Authors Susan McCarthy and Jeffrey...

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Event on 11/12/03 in Berkeley. Lauren Ornelas, photographed at Smart Alec's restaurant in Berkeley, is the campaigns director of VIVA!USA, the three-year-old animal rights organization based in Davis that last month claimed a major victory: Its two-year boycott of Whole Foods not only led the $3.2 billion food retailer to change its policy towards only selling humanely raised animals, its CEO was convinced to go vegan. Chris Stewart / The Chronicle

Photo: Chris Stewart

Event on 11/12/03 in Berkeley. Lauren Ornelas, photographed at...

The Believers / What does it mean to eschew all animal products? Three animal rights ideologues on their moment of conversion

They are the true believers. They dream of a vegan future where animals are not used in any way - no milk, no eggs, no wool sweaters, no honey and no silk scarves (remember the silkworms).

They are abolitionists, who see the recent discovery of mad cow disease in the United States as another sign that humans are not only mistreating animals, but pursuing an unnatural cosmic path. Their agenda is simple: Get people to stop consuming animals.

Some were born wired this way, others grew into it later in life. They've heard all the pro-meat arguments, many shouted at them from the time they were young children.

"If people weren't supposed to eat meat, why do they have sharp teeth?" (Their collective answer: People don't need to eat meat to live.) "Why do you care more about people than animals?" (Why must caring be exclusive? Doesn't your heart have enough capacity to care about people and animals?)

What follows are the stories of how two animal rights activists and one best-selling author came to their beliefs. The activists have misdemeanor records for protesting on behalf of their beliefs, but they are not the criminally violent types associated with the recent bombings of corporate offices in Emeryville and Pleasanton to protest animal testing.

Those are the animal rights extremists FBI domestic terrorist expert Phil Celestini calls part of the "No. 1 domestic terrorist threat in the country." Animal rights activists were responsible for almost twice as much property damage in 2002 - more than $100 million - than in the 25 years before that, he said. The criminals behind the Bay Area bombings are still at large.

"There has been an upswing in both the amount and level of activity in the past 15 months," said Celestini, a special agent in the domestic terrorism operations unit.

Some of the lifelong activists said focusing on extremists takes away from what more moderate animal rights advocates are doing.

"Every movement takes a variety of tactics, and the animal rights movement is no different," said Lauren Ornelas, of Viva! USA, which concentrates on peaceful activism. While she disapproved of the attacks, she declined to discuss them further, saying she didn't know enough about them.

Said author Jeffrey Masson of the bombings: "I don't think it's the way to get people's attention. Rather, it gets their attention, but not their sympathy. I don't think that's the way to change people's minds."

The FBI's Celestini sketched a rough profile of a hard-core animal rights/eco-terrorist. "They're intelligent, usually well educated and come from a middle- or upper-middle-class family," he said. Frustrated in their futile attempts to change the culture, they turn to violence. He declined to name any specific groups the bureau was investigating, and acknowledged that description could fit a lot of people.

The people profiled here have found legal, if controversial, ways of encouraging others to have the same epiphany they did. Though they've found success, trying to turn around a culture where "billions and billions" of hamburgers are sold isn't easy.

You've seen Lisa Franzetta before - either in person or perhaps as the unnamed subject of that last wacky item on the 11 p.m. newscast; the 29-year-old Oakland resident probably wasn't wearing much.

Maybe you saw a clip of her in Miami, wearing little more than painted-on tiger stripes to protest the treatment of circus animals. Or maybe you saw her ice skating around a rink in San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza, covered by only slightly more than the sign she was carrying: "We'd rather bare skin than wear skin."

Franzetta is the photo opportunity from central casting: A 5-foot-5, 115-pound strawberry blonde with an easy, squinty smile who leads street theater on behalf of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the nation's most visible - and most widely loathed in some circles - animal rights organization. Identified mostly with celebrities such as pinup actress Pamela Anderson, for two decades it has been unafraid to run campaigns like the one comparing genocide to animals raised for food in "Holocaust on Your Plate." Or its 2000 anti-dairy ad campaign featuring a milk mustache over a photo of prostate-cancer patient and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It read, "Got prostate cancer?" PETA operatives don't call themselves activists; they're "abolitionists," the truest of true believers among the animals rights crowd.

Franzetta embodies the whimsical stunt side of PETA, charged with selling shamelessly goofy gestures like asking the East Bay town of Rodeo last year to change its name to something more animal-friendly. (Yes, she knows the name is pronounced ro-DAY-o - the folks back at corporate headquarters didn't care.)

Yet her rise to become one of the most visible noncelebrities associated with the movement has been as quick (four years) as it is unlikely. She's an Ivy League grad from an upscale New Jersey suburb who never did anything more radical than volunteer at animal shelters until she began working for PETA four years ago writing ad copy.

Her epiphany snuck up on her in her mid-20s, yet it is rooted firmly in a visceral disgust for seeing animals hurt or tortured. It first popped up in 10th-grade biology class: "We had dissected the fruit fly and the worm and the frog, and when we got to the pig, Lisa refused to do it," said Katherine Bell, who has known Franzetta since high school. Instead, Franzetta sat in the back of the class doing independent study.

"In high school, Lisa was the type of girl that high school boys in New Jersey wouldn't like too much; she was too smart," said Bell. "She was always brave and sexy and fun. It's just that in Randolph, New Jersey, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for that side of her to come out."

Soon, shortly after her parents noticed her picking ham bits out of casserole, Franzetta told her parents she had become vegetarian. She read Australian Peter Singer's "In Defense of Animals," the book that has launched thousands of animal rights activists for its premise that animals are sentient beings that feel as much as we do.

The more she read, the more she believed. "She has always been very stubborn," said her mother, Deborah Franzetta, who doesn't eat much red meat, but couldn't embrace the tofurkey her daughter convinced her to cook recently, either. "When she feels she's right about something, boy, it's hard to change her mind. I think that's what makes her a good activist."

Franzetta earned a biology degree in college. Fortunately, she said, she wasn't asked to dissect anything. While she had done a little volunteering with environmental groups, the animal rights movement was not really on her radar, and she knew little about PETA. While her Brown University classmates from the mid-'90s set their sights on the start-ups and stock options the exploding dot-com economy promised, Franzetta only knew that she wanted to work for a nonprofit.

Sick of New England, she moved to San Francisco six years ago with no job, and crashed on a pal's couch in the Mission District while she took temporary jobs in the Financial District. Landing in the middle of the city's dot-com hurricane, she went against the prevailing winds and began working for a job-training program for high school dropouts.

It was then that she began volunteering at the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and heard of the job opening at PETA's San Francisco office as an assistant to the director of development. She began by writing advertising copy, then transferred into the campaigns department. Her first demonstration was at the Powell Street cable car turnaround to protest the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and its handling of animals. A co-worker organizing the gig asked if she wanted to be the caged tiger. Why not, she said.

"It's funny how not naked you feel when you're wearing body paint," she said, remembering that first time she had nothing on other than panties and pasties and stripes.

"We're selling something just like everyone else, and we're marketing it to a public that is obsessed with sex and tabloid news," Franzetta said. "We're trying to get our message out there."

A photo opportunist had been born. And at PETA - the Stunts 'R' Us of social activism - she was embraced.

"She's fearless," said Tracy Reiman, the vice president of PETA's International Grassroots Campaigns and Franzetta's boss.

"Lisa is a rare combination in that she brings passion and intelligence and street smarts together," said Scott Anderson, senior vice president of development for the PETA Foundation and Franzetta's first boss. "She has a lot of guts. Plus, a lot of things we do are tongue-in-cheek. And Lisa gets that."

So while she's been beamed to living rooms around the globe barely sheathed as everything from a pig in Cleveland (to protest Wendy's Restaurants) to a leopard in Hong Kong, she's whimsical enough to conceive of stunts like sending a letter to heavy metal rockers Judas Priest, asking the band to change the lyrics of its 1978 "Hell Bent for Leather" album to the more animal-friendly "Hell Bent for Pleather," the nonleather alternative. Included in the letter was a photo of Franzetta - a big fan of the band - in a pleather dominatrix getup at a biker convention.

The band responded that they wear synthetic outfits.

Last Tuesday, Franzetta and a small corps of animal rights activists were planning to haul bloody animal pelts to the front of the War Memorial Opera House to greet patrons attending the opening night of the San Francisco Ballet. Their hope was to publicly shame and embarrass fur-wearing patrons, part of PETA's recent return to more aggressive street tactics, abandoned after organizers felt the public sensitivities to be too raw after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The return to form means more gory animal photos and bull's-eye-shaped stickers that read, "If you wear fur, watch your back." Franzetta said PETA doesn't ask its supporters to physically confront fur wearers, but "to use the stickers creatively."

She's been arrested three times on misdemeanor charges, but hasn't spent more than 10 hours behind bars. She approaches strangers she sees on BART and berates them for wearing a fur-trimmed collar. She hands out pamphlets to children shopping with their parents that read, "Your mommy kills animals!" She travels alone to foreign countries that aren't as comfy with the whole freedom-of-speech thing - not to mention women dressing in little more than tiger stripes in public - and doesn't mellow her act.

Franzetta doesn't own a car, and is paid modestly by Bay Area standards for her efforts; "between $30,000 and $40,000" is all she'll allow.

Hers is a labor of passion. Fueling the street theater shtick is a love of animals. And, of course, there's the spontaneity of working for PETA. At noon on New Year's Eve, Franzetta was back on Powell and Market, but this time fully clothed.

A week earlier, federal officials had announced that they had discovered the nation's first case of mad cow disease. Within hours of the announcement, Franzetta was brainstorming with other PETA organizers on how to react. Over the next several days, she helped to organize street protests in Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Nashville, Salt Lake City and San Francisco.

But staging a street protest in San Francisco - the Broadway of activist street theater - is more challenging. "You're competing with a guy in a pink leotard riding a unicycle down the block," Franzetta said, laughing. "It's hard to make a spectacle of yourself here."

On this gray day, the crowd was polite, if nonplussed. In a spot chosen for its heavy foot traffic - and not coincidentally right outside a steak house - a half-dozen activists set up shop. Parked on a curb nearby was a white billboard truck with, "There's a world of misery in every mouthful" and "Go vegan!" written over photos of bloodied animals.

Only half of the passersby broke stride to take the "vegetarian starter kit" handout or even to look at a PETA volunteer dressed as a cow and wildly shaking her head. "She's mad, crazy, from the mad cow disease. Get it?" Franzetta said and laughed. Two local TV stations turned up and stayed for much of the hourlong demonstration.

This may have been the holiday season, but Franzetta wasn't letting up on suspected meat-eaters.

Coble stopped pushing the stroller, patted his belly and took a step toward Franzetta, wanting to continue the exchange, but his family - down from Washington for the holiday - waved him forward.

"If I were them, I'd be more concerned about all the insecticides on the soybeans they're pushing on people," said Coble, a nuclear machinist who said he has been around livestock for much of his life. "With all this hysterical stuff we're hearing from both sides [about mad cow], what we need is somebody in the middle to take charge."

Franzetta won't be near the middle. She'll be in Singapore or Moscow or Huntsville, Ala., heckling the meat eaters and fur wearers and circus lovers. Her devotion to her work can be challenging to her social life. She's not attached and admits it can be difficult to maintain a relationship. She's seen a couple of relationships disintegrate because somebody either couldn't deal with the strictures of her vegan diet or didn't respect her work. "I love my work; I love being an activist," she said. "I love that I'm able to support myself full time doing this."

There's been only one thing she's refused to do. At a lobster protest in Maine, she was asked to put on a red thong and have tiny red flames painted on her bottom that said, "Being boiled burns my butt." It just crossed a line for her.

"But," said Reiman, her PETA boss, "she looks delicious in a lettuce bikini."

Few activists get face time with the CEO of the entity they're protesting. Usually, just as in a Michael Moore movie, some faceless corporate flack is dispatched to the picket line outside company headquarters to nod and empathize with the demonstrators and not say anything remotely meaningful - and then make them go away.

Which makes the story of how Lauren Ornelas, the lone U.S. representative of a British animal rights group, who persuaded the CEO of Whole Foods to go vegan, seem as surreal today as when the two met nearly a year ago. Not only that, but the ensuing online dialogue the 33-year-old Davis resident conducted with CEO John Mackey may someday be seen as helping to inspire industrywide changes in how "farmed" animals are raised.

The whole whirlwind still amazes Mackey. Twice the 50-year-old founder of the $3.1 billion upscale grocery chain stopped his retelling of how he connected with Ornelas to say, "I know you're not going to believe this, but this is the way it happened."

They "met" at the March 2003 Whole Food shareholders meeting in Austin, Texas. Ornelas and protesters from her Viva! USA group and others were demonstrating there, just as they had picketed outside many of the 145 Whole Foods grocery stores in the United States for the previous two years. They were upset with Whole Foods for selling duck they alleged had not been humanely raised.

After the meeting, Ornelas approached Mackey to chat. Mackey remembers the slight, 5-foot-tall San Antonio, Texas, native waiting her turn, "then looking me directly in the eye," and telling him she wanted to talk with him. Mackey replied that he had been vegetarian for nearly 30 years, a longtime animal lover and that he empathized with her. They exchanged cards and struck up an e-mail conversation that Mackey described as "not particularly warm and fuzzy."

"The message I got from her was, 'Mr. Mackey, you are a well-intentioned man, but you are not well-informed,' " Mackey remembered. "She was right. I was not as well-informed on animal welfare issues as I should have been."

Until last summer, when Mackey read a dozen books on the animal rights movement, a primer partially suggested by Ornelas. After finishing, Mackey not only said he had a clearer understanding of the conditions going on within the industry, "but I knew that being a vegan would be truer to my values."

Mackey toured the production facilities of Whole Foods' duck suppliers, partially at the urging of Ornelas. What he saw prompted Whole Foods to announce last October that it will "create farm-animal treatment standards to go above and beyond the company's current strict animal-welfare standards." Mackey hopes to have new policies in place by the end of the year for all animals. "Ducks are only the beginning," Mackey said. "We're going to do every species. We're going to let the animal welfare people lead us on this one."

The person who had a large part in leading Mackey to his personal, and in some ways to his professional, epiphany was Ornelas. She had hers when she was 5, when she asked her mom what chicken was. Her mom told her, and "I got really upset," Ornelas said.

Thus began a lifelong devotion to saving animals that would peak with her Mackey conversion. She started an animal rights club in high school, got arrested "about 10 times" over the years, had nuns tear down her "Go Veggie" posters in college, and constantly worked two jobs to support her activism until finally being hired full time at Viva three years ago.

She's led protests with a bloodied 8-foot rabbit at Procter & Gamble (for its animal testing) headquarters, been among those chained to the front door of Neiman Marcus to protest fur selling, picketed the homes of Bay Area academics involved in animal testing and seen mice "liberated" from an animal testing lab during a demonstration. She's smuggled video cameras into chicken- and hog-raising facilities to record their abuses, and has spent countless hours of shoe-leather, or pleather, activism - leafleting and petition signing. For much of her life she focused on animal testing until she read Gail Eisnitz's 1997 book, "Slaughterhouse," which details the seldom-considered process of how an animal becomes a human meal.

Now, her prime focus is persuading people to become vegans and spare "farmed" animals their lives.

There might not be a tougher place for an animal rights activist to grow up than prime Texas beef country. Or more formative. Ornelas was vegan before vegan was cool.

"In Texas, you'd see cows all the time," Ornelas said recently at a Berkeley restaurant popular for its vegan selections. "And I would look at them and say they shouldn't have to die for me to eat. I just inherently felt that was so wrong. I could imagine what it was like for them to lose their friend or their family member so I could eat a burger."

Growing up vegetarian in the heart of Texas beef country was part of Ornelas' childhood-long epiphany, which was complete by the time she went vegan when she was 16. Ornelas' father left the family when she was 4 and she was raised by a single mother who often worked two jobs during the fall so she could buy Christmas presents. Asked if her father's absence has in any way fueled the empathy she feels when a calf is separated from its parent, Ornelas paused for a second, looked down and said: "Possibly. When I see video of factory farms, I definitely empathize so much when I see a piglet taken away from its mother. I feel for that mom, I feel for that calf."

But her activism is informed by much more. Like many activists, she was influenced by Peter Singer's aforementioned book, "In Defense of Animals." In high school she was inspired by a talk given by an ex-vivisectionist and devoted hunter. "When I heard him, I said, 'Wow, if he can be vegan, so can I.' "

It wasn't easy, but Ornelas was comfortable being different. In high school, she hung out with the punkers and "the peace kids and the kids who wore padlocks around their necks." She started a vegetarian club and didn't care if anyone made fun of her. Back then - a mere 15 years ago - vegetarians and animal rights activists were virtual freaks in high schools in much of the country. "Always for some reason, I felt a little bit different. I wasn't ashamed, though."

Role models were scarce then, too.

"OK, this is embarrassing," Ornelas said. "Billy Idol was a vegetarian. And I really liked him a lot. And a lot of who he was - being a punk rocker - was standing up for what you believe in and not really caring what anybody thought about you. Just liking somebody like that made me feel that I don't care if people really like me or not, I'm going to be a vegetarian."

Embarrassing as that high-school pinup memory may seem, the punk DIY (do it yourself) ethic has propelled Ornelas throughout her life. Recently, she was asked to speak to an animal rights group on the UC Berkeley campus. As she walked through the doors of the psychology building where the meeting was being held in an upstairs classroom, she noticed the name of a professor. "We protested outside his house," she said matter-of-factly.

Eleven people attended the meeting; most were students and all but one was vegan. Ornelas was preaching to the choir here but nonetheless dutifully showed a video she shot at a hog farm, pointing out how tightly the pigs are packed into stalls.

The audience nodded. Her comments were hardly inflammatory, and she downplayed her Whole Foods coup. Afterward the questions were a mix of the chatty ("Where can you get vegan shoes?") and the pointed ("Are you wearing leather shoes?"). She wasn't.

She sent them out the door 90 minutes later urging them on: Spend an hour a week leafleting; help persuade a local school to create a vegan menu. The crowd appreciated the soft sell.

"It was a breath of fresh air to see a full-time activist who isn't angry," said Alexander Lerman, a 33-year-old Oakland Internet entrepreneur who's been vegan for a dozen years. Ornelas persuaded him to get more involved in spreading the word. "It's a stereotype of the animal rights activist to be angry. But she wasn't."

It's the same quality that attracted the attention of Mackey.

"Where activists lose me is when they don't want to engage you in a discussion, when they just want to attack you," he said. "Once we had a group send 2,500 faxes to us. What did that do? Make us change our fax number?

"Make no mistake about this: The animal rights groups did not coerce us into doing this. But they opened our eyes," he said.

As for converting him to veganism, "Lauren definitely got the ball rolling on that," he said.

A few things to know about author Jeffrey Masson, aside from his well-publicized 30-year-history of scholarly writing and intellectual combat, in which he's ticked off everyone from Freudian scholars to the New Yorker magazine:

He talks at warp speed, slowing only to verbally italicize a word for emphasis. He's not an activist, even though his best-sellers during the past decade have brought hard-core animal rights ideas into the mainstream. And he jokes that he initially resisted writing his new book, "The Pig Who Sang to the Moon," for fear of the personal epiphany that it would bring.

Ten years ago, while researching his best-selling "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals," which was co-written with Susan McCarthy, Masson adopted - or rather returned to - the vegetarian diet he was raised on by his Buddhism-following parents in the 1950s. He abandoned it as a college student. "I thought, if I write about farm animals, I know I'm going to go vegan. And I don't want to do that."

But he did go vegan - pretty much - as he researched "Pig," which had been on shelves just a couple of weeks before a recent San Francisco visit. Sprinkled with science and jammed with anecdotes of cuddly pigs and chickens who can tell time, the book ends with Masson's impassioned plea that the only way to stop the inhumane slaughter of animals is to stop eating them. While some vegans draw their dietary boundary at not eating "anything with a face," Masson prefers not to consume "anything that dreams."

He's still working on keeping that pledge. The "egg thing" hasn't gone well. And vegan shoes are hard to buy in New Zealand, where he lives now with his wife and two small children. But he did recently refuse to buy a new Volvo station wagon because it had leather seats. Set on buying the car because of the safety he believed it would provide his young children, he paid $3,000 extra for nonleather seats.

"But yes, this [sweater] is wool, and these are leather shoes, but I don't approve of them," he said and then laughed over tea at a Haight-Ashbury restaurant. His wavy hair is still thick at 62, his smile crisp and frequent. He quipped, "I'm a hypocrite."

The glib Masson is definitely on the short list of authors with the temerity, intellectual background and mainstream success to write a Barnes & Noble-ready book that talks about cuddly pigs and punctual chickens. For three decades the former Freudian scholar has been challenging and infuriating the intelligentsia, from taking on Freud's theories to ripping psychoanalysis to claiming that he has bedded more than 1,000 women.

Those battles were largely in the first part of his career, which arbitrarily came to an end in 1994 with the failure of his libel suit against the New Yorker magazine after a 10-year legal battle.

Since then, the Harvard-educated Sanskrit scholar, whose books have been translated into 20 languages, has become one of the leading mainstream voices for those who believe that animals have emotional lives. Since "Elephants," he's written best-sellers about the emotional lives of dogs and cats to wide acclaim and generally positive reviews.

But his new book forges into unchartered ground, arguing that pigs and goats and other barnyard animals are sentient beings just like dogs and cats. He admits the book will be a tough sell. There's a constituency for his first books - dog people, cat people - but he acknowledges there are precious few "cow people."

"Nobody can deny that if you a live with a parrot, it's a highly sociable thing," Masson said. "Of course they like us, of course they're emotional. Dogs, cats -the same thing. But who had ever lived with a chicken? A sheep? A cow? A goat? A pig? The people who did tended to be eccentrics. People on the fringe."

Masson validated what animal activists have believed for a long time: The only thing that holds people back from treating a pig as they do a dog is lack of exposure to a sow.

After tea, Masson heads up the street to a screening of the film, "The Emotional World of Farm Animals," a companion piece to his book. In it is the visual unfolding of Masson's research, and his change of heart. There he's filmed calling and scratching pigs as if they were family pets. Which they are at the animal sanctuaries he visited.

Yet the question shadowing his work is one familiar to many animal rights activists: Isn't his premise based on anthropomorphizing - ascribing human characteristics to nonhumans?

"In polls, 80 percent of Americans say we don't want meat from unhappy animals. That's a very profound kind of thing because if they mean that, the question of, 'What makes a farm animal happy?' becomes an issue for the first time in American history."

It's tough to define happiness for something that doesn't speak a human language.

"Yes," he said, "but common sense tells us confining something in a box is not going to make that person happy. Putting somebody in a prison is not going to make them happy. Telling them you can never leave this yard is not going to make them happy. We know that with people. We know more or less you need access to the opposite sex, to the outdoors, to exercise. You need family, you need friends. Nobody would deny that.

"I think if we just apply that common sense to farm animals, you get the same kind of answers."

But isn't that anthropomorphizing?

There's "good" anthropomorphizing and "bad," Masson said. Bad is people in Los Angeles dressing up their dogs in tuxes and gown to stage doggie wedding ceremonies. "But if you say, 'My dog is really lonely if I leave him alone for the whole day,' that's just being observant.

"I can't get into [my wife's] head. I don't know what she feels when she says, 'I feel love for you.' But I'm pretty sure it's something like what I feel. So when a cow is separated from its calf and they cry out for months, women get it."

Then why don't more people treat cows like cats?

"We don't have access to animals," Masson said. "We're more and more removed from them. We drive along a rural road and see cows on a hill and we say, 'Gee, that's not so bad. That's a good life.' But we never stop to say, 'How long is that life?'

"The average for a milking cow is four years. Chickens, 42 days - they'd live 15 years in the wild. Lambs, hardly any time before slaughter. Pigs, they could live 10-15 years; they live two. So, the potential for their happiness is considerably reduced. That in itself is something. There's no way around that."

Masson admits some academics are not ready to follow him down this path. They're courteous when he calls on them, but Masson said many are leery, fearing that because he's a "popularizer," someone "with an agenda," and "not one of them," that he will misinterpret his findings.

When he wanted to put bees to his "anything that dreams test" - to see if he could eat honey - he contacted a German bee expert to ask if bees can dream.

"And he wouldn't even go there," Masson said. "And then I e-mailed him and he said, 'Don't ever e-mail me again.' But you think, bees have a little brain, they do complex things, so why wouldn't they dream?

"It is a leap," he said. "But it's not a leap for mammals. They've done dream research on dogs, cats, all the farm animals."

"People say all dogs dream about is chasing cats. I think that's lame. I don't see any reason they wouldn't dream about us. Their relationship with us. Their feelings. Especially feelings. ... Why wouldn't animal dreams be about powerful feelings?"

If parts of academia aren't following Masson, the culture may be ready for his story. English is full of "symbols of our discomfort," he said. Just the other night at dinner, one of Masson's tablemates asked him to pass the veal - a word which comes from the French "veaux," which means, uh, "veal."

"We have to use a word that doesn't mean the animal," Masson said. "We would not say, 'Pass the baby calf?' We would be appalled. We do with chicken, yes. But pig is pork. Hamburger. We disguise it. Nobody says, 'Gimme snails.' We say, 'I'd like escargot?' And what does that mean? It's French for snails."

After seeing the film, Masson stands in front of the first of two sold-out audiences at the Red Vic movie house to answer questions and plug the book. The audience cheers wildly when Masson tells them he recently went vegan.

"Ah, it's good to be home," Masson says to the cheers.

He leaves out the part about the shoes and the sweater, but he's working on that.

Earlier, at dinner, he said:

"I'm not a purist, but I don't argue that my lack of purity is not a good thing. If somebody said, 'I read your book, and I'm not going to become a vegan, not even a vegetarian, but I think I'm going to eat less red meat" if they say, 'One day a week I'm not going to eat that s-,' that's good.

"Nobody is going to do this cold turkey, whatever that means," he said, then stopped for one of those italicized pauses. "You ever thought of that? What is cold turkey?"